Scandals tarnish a once proud foreign service

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Backbiting among diplomats has Israelis unsure whether to laugh or
cry, writes Ed O'Loughlin in Jerusalem.

There was a time when Israeli diplomats routinely worked magic.
This was a state that had to talk its way into recognised existence
at the United Nations in 1947 and which skilfully maintained good
relations with both the US and the Soviet Union in the darkest days
of the Cold War.

Weapons obtained from the communist East and capitalist West
helped it through its touch-and-go early years, when secret
understandings with its nominal foes in Jordan prevented the Arab
armies from closing the ring around it.

After the 1967 war, its greatest diplomat and foreign minister,
the South African-born Abba Eban, persuaded the world that the war
was defensive, even though Israel was first to attack.

His other great legacy was a store of Wildean epigrams,
including the famous "history teaches us that men and nations
behave wisely once they have exhausted all the alternatives".

But Abba Eban died in November 2002 a marginalised figure,
having spent his last three decades opposing the post-1967
occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. These days
many Israelis would sadly agree that the glory days of their
foreign service appear to be behind it.

A string of diplomatic setbacks and controversies have led to
talk of serious internal problems in a service whose prestige was
once second only to the mighty Department of Defence.

In recent days there have been allegations of improper financial
conduct in embassies in South Korea and Hungary and a consulate in
Miami. Last month the ambassador to Ethiopia unsuccessfully tried
to shoot himself in an Addis Ababa hotel.

In Australia the Government still refuses to reveal its reasons
for in effect expelling the junior consular officer Amir Lati, who
left in January amid rumours of amorous conduct with a host of
Australian women in sensitive government jobs.

Then his nominated successor in Canberra, Aryeh Sher, had to be
withdrawn at the last minute after it emerged that he had been
internally disciplined (though not charged or convicted) in
relation to an underage sex scandal in Brazil.

But the biggest scandal came this week, eclipsing in the news
even a mass campaign of roadblocks by right-wing settlers and
disturbing signs of renewed Jewish fundamentalist terrorism.

At the centre of the row are the Foreign Minister, Silvan
Shalom, and Israel's ambassador to Washington, Daniel Ayalon.

According to the most lurid - and thus in Israel the most widely
believed - version of events, the spat dates back to a visit late
last year by Madonna, who came to the Holy Land to further her
interest in the mystical school of thought known as Kabbalah.

Mr Shalom's wife, Judy Nir Moses Shalom - a chat show host and
socialite often satirised in Israel as a sort of surgery-addicted
Dame Edna - was said to have been angered when Mr Ayalon's personal
assistant failed to arrange for her to meet the American pop star.
The Ayalon camp alleges that in revenge she subsequently persuaded
her husband to have the young man sacked.

Mr Ayalon responded by publicly accusing his boss of using his
power to advance his wife's personal grudges and referred the case
of his sacked aide to Israel's civil service commission. He also
claims to have secretly taped telephone conversations in which he
is told by other Foreign Ministry officials that it was "Judy" who
had ordered the dismissal.

By the end of the week Mr Shalom's camp was telling the media
that it could no longer work with Mr Ayalon and would be ordering
his recall from the US. Although the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon,
continued to back the man he appointed, it is unclear if he will be
prepared to risk a showdown with Mr Shalom, who controls a key
block of support in the Likud party.

Most Israelis seem unsure whether to laugh or cry at the garish
reports of hubris, pettiness and corruption among their country's
elite. But insiders say that, whatever the trigger, the real cause
of the row is deeply ingrained in the structure of Israeli foreign
policy.

Mr Shalom may be widely regarded by most foreign and (more
privately) Israeli diplomats as an ambitious lightweight who owes
his job to the vagaries of Likud party politics and to his
ambitious spouse -he has unkindly been referred to as "a
politician's wife" - but the problem he faces has defeated stronger
figures before him.

As Israel has come to depend more and more on the support of the
United States, successive Israeli prime ministers have taken to
appointing their own people as ambassadors to Washington, in effect
cutting the foreign minister out of the loop.

Even the great Abba Eban was frustrated by his inability to
influence then prime minister Golda Meir's ambassador to Washington
- the future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.